Disclaimer: I am now retired, and am therefore no longer
an expert on anything. This blog post
presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.
In my mind, David Grinspoon’s “Earth In Human Hands” raises
two issues of import as we try to take a long-term view of what to do about
climate change:
1.
How best
do we approach making the necessary political and cultural changes to tackle
mitigation – what mix of business/market, national/international governmental,
and individual strategies?
2.
For the even longer term, how do we tackle a
“sustainable” economy and human-designed set of ecosystems? Grinspoon claims that there are two opposing
views on this – that of “eco-modernists” who say that we should design
ecosystems based on our present setup, ameliorated to achieve sustainability,
and those of “environmental purists” who advocate removal of humans from
ecosystems completely.
First, a bit of context.
Grinspoon’s book is a broad summary of what “planetary science” (how
planets work and evolve on a basic level, with our example leavened by those of
Venus and Mars) has to say about Earth’s history and future. His summary, more or less, is this: (a) For the first time in Earth’s history,
the whole planet is being altered consciously – by us – and therefore we have
in the last few hundred years entered a whole new geological era called the
Anthropocene; (b) That new era brings with it human-caused global warming and
climate change, which form a threat to human existence, and therefore to the
existence of Anthropocene-type “self-conscious” life forms on this planet, a
threat that he calls the “Anthropocene bottleneck”; (c) it is likely that any
other such planets with self-conscious life forms in the universe face the same
Anthropocene bottleneck, and other possible threats to us pale in comparison,
so that surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck is a good sign that humanity will
survive for quite a while.
Tackling Mitigation
Grinspoon is very forceful in arguing that probably the only
way to survive the Anthropocene bottleneck is through coordinated, pervasive
global efforts: in particular, new
global institutions. Translated, that
means not “loose cannon” business/market nor individual nor even conflicting
national efforts, but science-driven global governance, plus changes in
cultural norms towards international cooperation. Implicitly, I think, his model is that of the
physics community he is familiar with:
one where key information, shared and tested by scientific means,
informs strategies and reins in individual and institutional conflicts.
If there is anything that history teaches us, it is that
there is enormous resistance to the idea of global enforcement of
anything. I myself tend to believe that
it represents one side of a two-sided conflict that plays out in any society –
between those more inclined toward “hope” and those inclined toward “fear”,
which in ordinary times plays out as battles between “liberals” and
“conservatives.”
Be that as it may, Grinspoon does not say there is not
resistance to global enforcement. He
says, however, that global coordination, including global enforcement, is a
prerequisite for surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck. We cooperate and thereby effectively mitigate
climate change, or we die. And the rest
of this century will likely be the acid test.
I don’t disagree with Grinspoon; I just don’t think we know what degree of cooperation
will be needed to deal with climate change in order to avoid facing the
ultimate in global warming. What he describes would be ideal; but we are
very far from it now, as anyone watching CO2 rise over at Mauna Loa is well
aware. Rather, I think we can take his
idea of scientifically-driven global mitigation as a metric and an “ideal”
model, to identify key areas where we are falling down now by failing to react
quickly, globally, and as part of a coherent strategy to scientific findings on
the state of climate change and means of mitigation.
Designing Sustainability
Sustainability and fighting climate change are not
identical. One of the concerns about
fighting climate change is that while most steps toward sustainability are in
line with the quickest path to the greatest mitigation, practically, some are
not. This is because, for example, farming
almonds in California with less water than typical almond farming does indeed
reduce the impact of climate-change-related water shortages, but also
encourages consumption of water-greedy almonds.
I would argue, in that case, that the more direct path towards
climate-change mitigation (discouraging almond growing while reducing water consumption
in general) is better than the quicker path towards sustainability (focus on
the water shortage).
This may seem arcane; but Grinspoon’s account of the fight
between environmental traditionalists and eco-modernists suggests that the
difference between climate-change-mitigation-first and sustainability-first is
at least a major part of the disagreement between the two sides. To put it another way, the traditionalists
according to Grinspoon are advocating “no more people” ecosystems which
effectively minimize carbon pollution, while the eco-modernists are advocating
tinkering incrementally with the human-driven ecosystems that exist in order,
apparently, to achieve long-term sustainability – thereby effectively putting
sustainability at a higher priority than mitigation.
It may sound as if I am on the side of the
traditionalists. However, I am in fact on
the side of whatever gets us to mitigation fastest – and here there is a
glaring lack of mention in Grinspoon of a third alternative: reverting to ecosystems with low-footprint
human societies. That can mean Native American,
Lapp, Mongolian, or aborigine cultures, for example. But it also means removing as far as possible
the human impact exclusive of these cultures.
Let’s take a recent example:
the acquisition of Native Americans with conservationist aid of land
around the Columbia River to enable restoration and sustainability (as far as
can be managed with increasing temperatures) of salmon spawning. This is a tradeoff: In return for removal of almost all things
exacerbating climate change, possibly including dams, the Native Americans get
to restore their traditional culture as far as possible in toto. They will be, as in their conceptions of
themselves, stewards of the land.
And this is not an isolated example (again, a recent book
limns efforts all over the world to take the same strategy). An examination of case studies shows that
even in an impure form, it provides clear evidence of OVERALL negative impact
on carbon pollution, while still providing “good enough” sustainability. Nor do I see reflexive opposition from
traditionalists on this one.
The real problem is that this approach is only going to be
applicable to a minority of human habitats.
However, it does provide a track record, a constituency, and innovations
useful for a far more aggressive approach towards mitigation than the one the
eco-modernists appear to be reflexively taking. In other words, it offers hope for an approach
that uses human technology to design sustainable ecosystems, even in the face
of climate changes, with the focus on the ecosystem first and the humans second. The human technology can make the humans fit
the ecosystem with accommodation for human present practice, not the other way
around.
In summary, I would say that Grinspoon’s idea of casting how
to deal with mitigation and sustainability as a debate between traditionalists
and modernists misses the point. With all the cooperation in the world, we
still must push the envelope of mitigation now in order to have a better chance
for sustainability in the long term. The
strategy should be pushed as far as possible toward mitigation-driven changes of
today’s human ecosystems, but can be pushed toward what worked with humans in
the past rather than positing an either/or humans/no-humans choice.
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